Tuesday, September 27, 2011

[smashing barbed wire between trenches with mortar shells; Europe during the Great War]

From the very beginning the concept of fencing was inverted in the
American colonies. In England the law
required that domesticated animals be fenced in and managed on a piece of
property- it was a strategy of retention. In the Americas however, a tradition of
common lands and open grazing quickly developed. Livestock were left to roam free and rounded
up at the end of the season for slaughter or overwintering in barns, while
farmers were responsible for fencing in their fields or subsistence
gardens. And so they did, developing
fence types as a defensive strategy of
detention, meant to keep hogs, deer, goats and other livestock or wild
animals at bay. Though the spatial
patterns and urbanization regimes varied wildly throughout the Americas, the
fencing strategy of enclosed, agricultural production surrounded by expansive
open lands for grazing was normalized from the commons of New England to the haciendas of California and Mexico, the estancias of Chile and Argentina, and the
fazendas of Brazil.

The materials at hand influenced the fence types developed. The Virginia worm fence was especially
popular in the English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. Despite using massive quantities of wood it
needed no metal, leather, mortar, or other valuable materials and could be
cannibalized during the winter for firewood when there were no crops to
protect. This policy quickly brought the
colonists in the east into conflict with the indigenous people who considered
the lands to be their hunting grounds and the roaming pigs to be free
game. Despite the political
difficulties, the material demands of this fencing strategy were well suited to
the eastern seaboard and the technology began to spread west during the 19th
century.

[the Virginia worm fence at Gettysburg, PA]

While the Louisiana Purchase in 1804 opened up the possibility of US
expansion westward, it was not until nearly 60 years later with the signing of
the Homestead Act by Abraham Lincoln that population pressure began to
increase. With the ending of the civil
war, the maturation of canal technologies and rise of steam locomotive engines,
Americans began pushing to expand out of the woodland areas of Appalachia and
into the plains. In the Midwest there
were few trees, and there certainly weren’t enough to build a house and
construct a ridiculous worm-fence around one’s property to protect the farm
from the cattle and bison roaming free.

Barbed wire made homestead settlement there possible. By offering a fence technology that used very
little wood and was relatively easy to construct, barbed wire fencing made it
possible to farm in the Midwest. Sales
of barbed wire boomed. The Texas Genealogy and History site notes that in 1875 the Washburn and Moen Wire Company sold 10,000
pounds of barbed wire. Five years later
it sold nearly 51,000,000 pounds in Texas alone. Railroad right-of-ways were required to be
lined with the wire, which proved a useful source to farmers who found
themselves in a pinch or without the ability to get to market.

National armies quickly realized that this wire not only hindered
livestock but also humans and anything else made of flesh, and it was quickly
deployed to demarcate defensive positions.
Coils of the stuff were rolled out between trenches to create thick
defensive membranes that offered little resistance to mortars and bullets but were
impenetrable to grounded fleshy combatants.
Within a century this temporary strategy had crystallized along
contested borders such as the Korean DMZ or parts of the US-Mexico border. A frontier technology was adapted for the border
landscape.

[American GI's put down barbed wire coils on the Korean border; 1962]

[the Korean Demilitarized Zone, between North and South Korea; barbed wire is used in conjunction with lighting and a patrol regime to ensure the border is not transgressed]

Deploying barbed wire is a land-assault strategy: it is a measure of control for creating a
territory, and it is geographical (just putting a chunk down that one can easily
go around does nothing). And it is perceived
as a particularly nasty one, offending our delicate sensibilities because it
confronts a most basic weakness- fleshness.
But this was not always the case- there was a time when barbed wire
fencing was perceived as a miracle of the American frontier can-do spirit, and
as such there are still historical societies and old-timers that travel around
collecting special pieces of the stuff.

Levi Bryant’s ontic principle
suggest to us that a whole new range of fence types might be developed and
deployed, and that especially in frontier landscapes- those defined by ambiguous
and overlapping jurisdictions, perceived dangers, and latent potentiality-
fencing might be particularly apt as a strategy for respecting difference.
Everyone has seen if not noticed the weeds and trees that spring up
along guardrails and fence lines that can’t be easily mowed. Robert Irwin’s “Two Running Violet V Forms”
showed that fences can create difference without limiting human movement, and Brett Milligan’s “Goats on Belmont” project is
an example of a fence generating the conditions for a recreational landscape
[granted, it’s a stupid chain link fence and it’s the project that is smart. nonetheless the project couldn’t happen without the fence].

[combinations of banal materials and forms like jersey barriers and chain link fencing might be used to separate in unexpected ways and generate new possibilities for use and experience]

[construction fencing, here used to simply demarcate a swath of trees to be cleared, also serves to register topographic change and plays against the tree trunks and vegetation; this might be used not only to showcase formal variation but also to create the conditions for new plant ecologies, goat parks, or play areas]

We’d like to see more ASLA awards go to landscape projects laced with
flesh-tearing wire, keeping out voracious yuppy whiners like ourselves and
sharing its secrets only with the lunatics, chimney swifts, and mycorrhizae
that respect the de/militarized landscape.
That may be a bridge to far for now, but by considering seemingly
mundane, offensive, or inappropriate technologies in the context of the
frontier landscape that is endemic to the Americas, we might develop some new
possibilities for program, form and construction of a real public space.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

["Knives, Daggers, and Forks Made by Lunatics", a piece in the "Madmen's Museum", described in fascinating detail in Cassell's Magazine in 1903; image source]

Brooklyn Bridge Park is lit by metal halide lamps strapped to telephone
poles*, creating what you might
call a “parking lot aesthetic”. It’s
true that the wood pole-with-cobra-head-lamp is a ubiquitous object along most
city streets, often coupled with telephone cables and electric power
lines. And it’s also true that most
people consider a good park light to be the pedestrian-scale glowing object
descended from the old gas lamps lining the promenades of European
capitals. But this misses an important precedent:
the old moon light towers of the 19th century.

Between 10 and 20 stories high, these towers were meant to light great
swaths of the city and seem to have been particularly useful in sprawling
industrial towns with big working and recreational spaces that would have been
too costly to light with pedestrian lamps. The moonlight towers, an arc light on top of a
truss tower, were an American adaptation of a trend begun in Paris where efficient
arc lamps began to be used at the top of buildings in place of oil and gas lamps. Though extremely efficient and
relatively easy to operate, arc lights burgn bright and extremely hot and so
were not suitable for indoor use. However, when placed on top of a giant tower they had the ability to light entire city blocks using far less labor and energy than gas lamps.

[lighting in Brooklyn Bridge park; as the trees grow over time the differences in light and shadow will become more pronounced]

In 1885, this New York Times report of the Convention of the National Electric Light Association reported that Detroit was using 90 of these towers in a triangulated pattern to light an area 10 1/2 square miles at a price that was slightly cheaper than naphta or gas lights. The result was such that "the entire city was lighted as if by an artificial moon and the rear yards and alleys were made as light as the street." Judging by the trusses and cables in the below picture the effect was likely that of an elegant scaffold erected over the city.

[Throughout the last part of the 19th century Detroit maintained an extensive network of moonlight towers that set the standard in municipal lighting until buildings grew taller in the 1890's. The scale of the towers create big open space, ground planes not articulated by paths of light posts]

[Austin, Texas still has approximately 17 moonlight towers operating in the town; they have been preserved throughout the 20th century despite the shift away from tower lights in municipal systems]

Of course, that report, being from the Electric lighting commission, was biased. It did light up streets and alleys and yards, but only those blocked by buildings and trees. Despite the tower’s ability to light up entire city blocks with the
power of a moon, they fell out of favor because they created large shadows. The ever higher buildings of the 19th
and early 20th century often resulted in one half of the street
being well-lit while the other half was in total darkness. The large territories of shadow-and-light
created zones beyond the control of the city manager; creeping grins leered at
the upstanding citizens on evening strolls from across the road, and hideous creole
cackles rang through the darkened half-streets of industrial towns up and down the
Mississippi Valley.

The lights were phased out and the streets more evenly lit by
pedestrian poles topped with new electrical incandescent lamps. Nonetheless, it is encouraging that these
effects are being brought back into public spaces. Not every place needs to be domesticated by a
pedestrian scale lamp, bathed in light and scaled to the human body. While landscape architects have traditionally been consumed with the creation of the perception of safety and control, we like
to think there is room for the lunatics who roam the shadows, ebbing and flowing
with the light of the moon [1, 2]. Because
landscape practice not only establishes a territory and formalizes methods of
control, it also generates the conditions for deterritorialization, speculating on ways that those boundaries might be transgressed and how one might embrace the
bigness and wildness of it all.

[New Orleans used a moonlight tower in the 1880s and 90s along the levee at Canal Street. The all night light and shadow enabled industry, commerce, and recreation to continue throughout the night in the French Quarter.

* it appears that they are metal halide from a brief on the ground inspection; in fact they may be another type of lamp for all we know

1- the term "lunatic" can be traced back to the latin "luna" for moon, from the belief that periods of insanity were related to the cycles of the moon.

2- we don't mean to imply too strongly that MVVA is very concerned with the lunatics and operations of deterritorialization. In fact, they are one of the best at gentrifying derelict urban zones through landscape design, working almost exclusively for the bourgeioise. But they also do some interesting work that transgresses their own control mechanisms, and the lighting in Brooklyn Bridge Park may prove to be an example of this. Regardless, it is far superior and more apt to use tall lights at the waters edge in NYC than it is to put those ridiculous pedestrian poles that line the riverfront promenades on the west side.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

The American frontier is sharply distinguished
from the European frontier- a fortified boundary line running through dense
populations. The most significant thing
about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land. - Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History.” 1893.

The Pan-American Highway began in earnest in 1923, spurred on by the
construction of the Panama Canal in 1914.
The segment of the highway connecting the Canal to North America was a
defensive strategy to protect North American commercial interests from German
U-boats. It aimed to connect the commercial
shipping centers in the US with Mexico City, capital cities in Central America
and the Panama Canal. To the south, the
Darién Gap stayed on the periphery and the Pan-American Highway remained
incomplete. Since that time significant
efforts have been made to complete the road in support of commercial interests
and increased the mobility of regional populations.

[the Inter American Highway connecting the Panama Canal, the capital cities of Central America, and Interstate 35 in Laredo, Texas]

The Darién Gap exists between the Panamanian settlement of Aviza and
the Colombian town of Cúcuta. It is 87
kilometers of jungle highlands and swampy delta along the border of Panama and
Colombia and is purportedly a haven to the biodiversity of the isthmus, the indigenous
Kuna people, and FARC operatives. Despite
its strategic location at the crossroads of North and South America and the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the geography of the Gap has defied attempts at European
settlement owing to the difficulty of the terrain.

In recent years environmental interest groups have joined forces with
indigenous peoples and the powerful Panamanian beef lobby to argue against the
completion of the road. Panamanian
ranchers maintain that the Gap provides a biological buffer preventing the
spread of hoof-and-mouth disease from Colombia in to Central and North
America. This confluence of immense
potentiality, bigness of the terrain, contested commercial interests, and difficulty
in establishing new settlements is a historical fact dating back at least to
the beginning of European colonization.

[the Isthmus of Panama, the Darien Gap is at the very southern edge of Panama]

[an admittedly ambiguous close up of the Darien Gap; the Atrato River creates a massive swampy delta in the Darien lowlands before pouring in to the Caledonia Bay to the North; the swampy conditions made North European agricultural practices impossible and bred sickness that undid the Caledonia Colony]

In the late 17th century the major European powers had
established important colonies, trade routes and treaties throughout the
Americas. During the frothy expansion of
European colonialism Scotland was inspired by entrepreneur William Patterson to
try and establish a commercial colony on the Isthmus of Panama from where they
could control trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The area was a de facto Spanish domain but uncontested
as its difficult geography, low indigenous populations, and lack of mineral
wealth left it outside of the imperial regime, a situation the Scots hoped to
take advantage of.

In 1698 they marshaled most of the capital in the country through
public stock offerings and the Darién Company launched a settlement expedition with
the intent to establish the Colony of Caledonia. It was known that the region of Caledonia
offered a natural harbor with the promise of shelter and a chance at
success. Their demise was immediate, at
one point dying at a rate of 10 per day due to sickness and the unsuitability
of the land to Northern European agricultural practices. By 1700 the colony was done and the survivors
were ushered out by a cluster of armed Spanish ships. The loss of most of the Scotland’s capital
was an important factor in Scotland’s union with England in 1707. As part of the union England agreed to repay
Scotland’s wealthy citizens the money they had lost on the venture plus 5%
interest. It proved enough to buy them
off. The modern day Darién Gap is still
inhabited by the Kuna people, explored by intrepid adventurers and tourists, exploration
expeditions are occasionally mounted, and the FARC slides in and out remaining
out of reach of Colombian authorities.

[the Darian Gap on the Panama Isthmus connecting North and South America, the object of Scotland's colonial desires]

Frederick Jackson Turner’s characterization of the frontier was
important in recognizing its importance in shaping American
societies. We would extend this to all of
the Americas, arguing that the frontier condition existed throughout the
continent. The frontier was also
non-directional. It was a heterogeneous
and uneven agglomeration of difficult and contested territories where myriad indigenous
and divergent colonial interests- Scotch, Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese-
were smashing into one another over and over.
That is, the land wasn’t totally open as Turner suggested, but rather the jurisdictional
administration was ambiguous, and
this generated the potentiality which the Scottish recognized in the Darien
Gap, the United States recognized in the Southwest, and the French saw in the
Mississippi Valley. The frontier was
endemic to the American landscape, marked by difficult terrain, a tantalizing
mix of potential commercial success and imminent disaster, and overlapping and
ambiguous jurisdictions. The Darién Gap, in short.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

After taking a month break we are back here at FASLANYC headquarters and it’s only fair to take care of some
housekeeping first. Of note in the last
month, Places has been running a series on fiction, and Mammoth is
wrapping up one of the longest blog series of all time on floods and the Mississippi River. We’ve forgotten why it
started, but it is definitely worth perusing, especially now as it wraps up. Brett Milligan of F.A.D. has been documenting the second edition of the “Goats on Belmont” project in Portland, Oregan.

In NYC related news, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley are moving to town to run
Studio-X and will presumably be crossing swords with the Friends of the Pleistocene, who just released their “Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York.” Julie
Bargmann is moving D.I.R.T. Studio to Brooklyn and that only seems fair.
D.I.R.T. in Charlottesville always felt like a polar bear in a municipal
zoo in Mobile, Alabama- it sounds like a cool idea and it can live, but it is just
sad, covered in mud, and not even the visitors are happy that it is there. She’ll be part of the “Second Wave of Modernism” conference at the MoMA in November with a lineup that is what you
might call heavy. Also coming to NYC are our favorite
philosophers Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, as well as the prolific Timothy Morton
for the Object Oriented Ontology symposium.
Read these guys, and if you are in the city drop by on Wednesday,
September 14th.

[D.I.R.T. Studio's webpage announcement; it is unclear whether Bargmann is Kong or the damsel, but it's awesome]

Lastly, we managed to slip an essay into Kerb 19- Paradigms of Nature: Post Natural Futures alongside some impressive contributors including Paisajes
Emergentes, Scape Studio, Liam Young, David Gissen, and several others. Our piece is about mushrooms. We’re also excited that another of our
favorites, Camilo Restrepo of Medellin, Colombia will be landing in Virginia in
a couple of weeks to discuss recent work. If you're in Charlottesville drop by, and if you want to get a drink, send an email.

Let the games begin.

******

One of our interests here at FASLANYC
is to develop a theory and practice of the American Landscape. It’s a topic we’ve discussed before and will
be exploring more in the coming months.
The idea springs from the belief that the Americas are horrible and awesome and
should be understood as an exceptional landscape condition. Our main approach for a while will be through
a study of frontiers and borders. Whereas in Europe the words "frontier" and "border" are synonymous, they hold vastly different meanings in the Americas.

[the San Gabriel Jesuit mission in Los Angeles County, 1818; the missions in california and throughout the borderlands of the Spanish colonial empire are testament to the fact that the creation of the American landscape was not an east-to-west phenomenon, but occurred from multiple directions at different times and under the influence of various imperial and indigenous regimes]

[the ruins of the San Juan Capistrano mission in California; image source]

Historian Walter Prescott Webb noted in the 1940's that in the
Americas a frontier was “not a line to stop at, but an area inviting entrance.
Instead of having one dimension, length, as in Europe, the American frontier
has two dimensions, length and breadth.”
It gets particularly interesting when you combine this concept with the
realization of another historian of the American West- Herbert Eugene Bolton. He argued that the story of the Americas can’t
be understood simply as an inexorable, anglo-centric march west, as famously characterized
by Frederick Jackson Turner and Webb. Bolton’s
contribution was to simply and emphatically point out that the United States
may have largely expanded west but the story of the American landscape itself
was not one of westward expansion.

The American West was not an undifferentiated, untamed wilderness
waiting to be harnessed by the new American nation. It was
a land already claimed and inhabited by the Spanish, Portuguese, Mexicans,
English, French, minor European nations, and the hundreds of indigenous tribes
and nations that in no way considered themselves a homogeneous block. Each of these societies relied on different
regimes and created unique forms and patterns of settlement, trade, and defense
enmeshed in overlapping and contested claims of authority. It was a landscape of violence, smashing, and
bigness with its own emphases and necessities, and this landscape condition was
endemic throughout all the Americas.

The frontier in the American landscape is not just Webb’s thick
zone at the settled edge having both depth and length, but it is also defined
by overlapping and ambiguous administrative jurisdictions- it is not always
clear who is in charge, and that creates a unique set of problems and
possibilities. By understanding this we
might be able to recover and further develop an American landscape
approach. We would argue this approach
has been largely lost since the European Turn, when the design academy in the United
States decided that we needed to align ourselves closely with Western Europe
(not a bad idea) to the exclusion of continued
dialogue throughout the Americas (a very limiting idea). We argue that we should be studying the
Americas as a hemisphere: a
post-colonial, modern landscape defined by overlapping and ambiguous
jurisdictions.

[a ladder leading to a border tunnel access along the US-Mexico border; the tactics and strategies used to destabilize authoritarian power in these zones constructs a kind of contemporary American frontier; image from the New York Times]

To that end, we’ll be zooming around the Americas, looking at frontier and border landscapes, historical and contemporary, and offering some thoughts
on them. We’ll likely be changing our
thinking about some of the concepts as they develop, and invite you to offer
any thoughts that might push that process along. We’ll continue posting on other topics occasionally,
and of course we should just admit that this effort is also a chance to mix
stories of cowboys and South America.
And so we shall.